Civic Practices

Civic Practices Book is the first CivicWise book and it brings together 90 contributions from 16 countries and 40 cities. The book is organized in four sections: spaces, actions or projects, methodologies and research.

Civic Practices have always existed. The most primitive forms of urbanization emerged from self-organised communities to address their needs. Civic Practices are not new, but new opportunities are emerging in this context of post-2008 Global Financial Crisis. The aim of this book is to contribute to compiling initiatives, claims, campaigns, actions, projects, pieces of research, methodologies, participatory and co-design processes that are happening all over the world to create communities of practice, of Civic Practices.

CivicWise is a distributed and open community. Its mission is to empower citizens by fostering collaborative urbanism, promoting civic innovation and inspiring civic engagement. CivicWise wants to canalize and use the global knowledge to improve local civic projects, involving people all around the world that are facing similar problems. The aim is to federate the collective intelligence by using and experiencing it through local actions. CivicWise promotes a better collaboration between general public, university, local business and local authorities.

The content of the book is multi-lingual. In order to make this publication as inclusive as possible, each author or group of authors has written in its own language. The preface and introduction are written in English.

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This collaborative project has been possible thanks to multiple digital and physical meetings and interactions. To do it we have used different platforms: working spaces that are CivicPoints of the CivicWise network, platforms for messaging exchange, platforms for video conference, file-sharing platforms, a glocal community meeting where dedicated workshops took place—the CivicWise GlocalCamp Paris 2016.

The main targets of this global CivicWise project are the production of collective intelligence, as well as the development of teams, ensuring at the same time results that reveal openness, diversity, inclusiveness and glocal crossings.

We thank all contributors at all levels that made this experience possible.

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The crowdfunding campaign videoCivic Practices was funded by a crowdfunding campaign at Goteo. The book is an open-source project. The e-book version is available in open access at CivicWise.

To do it, we assembled a core team made by CivicWisers that: developed a strategic approach for this first experience, organized its structure, content, and ways to achieve its goals, launched a communication campaign to advertise the initiative and made an open call for contributions on this topic worldwide. In parallel, another CivicWise dedicated team was assembled to develop an associated crowdfunding campaign.